How are other European airports coping?
I was watching a fair bit of ARD (German TV) at the weekend, and it's clear that Frankfurt had problems - on Saturday they lost about 30% of their operation, and even today a significant proportion of services were to be cancelled. BUT, and it's a bit BUT, the airport has not been effectively closed for days on end the airport has continued to function to at least some extent. Lufthansa didn't take a BA type decision to cancel all services from FRA either.
When journalists are comparing how the UK (LHR principally) compares with other airports they always go striaght for Canadian and Scandinavian airports, where they always have "real winter". The comparisons need to be made with AMS, CDG and FRA and against them we simply don't measure up.
In my opinion the blame lies at the door of the idiots that privatised BAA, and permitted airport operators, looking for profit, to pair back too far their snow clearing capacity - and heypresto we wind up in the almighty mess which, whatever the politicians and spin doctors from BAA say, is an embarassment for the UK.